Avis Metacritic

A brilliantly unflinching look at a society built on extreme disparities that reads more like an omen than a far-fetched fantasy, New Order repeatedly subverts any hope of redemption. It guts you with the worst of human nature, like Franco often does, but within a larger sociopolitical scale, and for that, it’s utterly unshakable.

If good intentions or even pragmatism aren’t enough to make the wealthy and powerful think about income inequality, New Order suggests, there’s always fear.

Audiences might conceivably be divided on the vicious gut punch of Franco's approach, but as a call for more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it's terrifyingly riveting.

New Order may split audiences who require a more conventional approach, but this is dynamic cinema which takes no prisoners outside the hostages on screen: loud and violent, it lures the viewer into a place where there can be no bystanders. In that way, it’s quite magnificent – an outlet for those boiling in our times.

The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.

It’s a bold, angry, provocative indictment, but because Franco zooms back to the state-of-the-nation big picture, he loses sight of the characters who were sketched so sharply in the opening scenes. They’re still in the film, but they have so little agency and dialogue that they are reduced to counters on a board – or ants for him to scorch beneath his magnifying glass.

Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.

The relevance of Franco’s message is undeniable, but his handling of it is reckless and just muddles his themes in the pursuit of appearing intellectual.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

If nothing else, New Order demonstrates that the line that separates festival-lauded arthouse films from crass exploitation fare can be very thin indeed.